All Things Excellent are as Common as They are Precious, Nietzsche, La Volonté de puissance, Livre III, 459

by Corry Shores
[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]
[Nietzsche Entry Directory]
[Nietzsche La Volonté de puissance, Entry Directory]

[The following is summary and not translation. Please check my interpretation against the original text reproduced below.]

All Things Excellent are as Common

as They are Precious

Friedrich Nietzsche

La Volonté de puissance

II

Livre III:

Le nihilisme vaincu par lui-même

3. L'innocence du Devenir

(The Innocence of Becoming)

459

Nietzsche must renounce both sin and virtuous merit. The values that remain are the aesthetic judgments that come immediately to our senses, for example, ordinary, rare, attractive, smooth, harmonious, and so forth. But even these values can be given a non-aesthetic “scientific” basis. We can say that what is rare is something that quantitatively speaking is proportionally much less plentiful than everything else. And we might define the ordinary as what we value highly, even higher than the rare, and so forth.

1881-1882 (XII, 1re partie, § 146)

From the Bianquis translation:

Il me faut renoncer non seulement au dogme du péché, mais à celui du mérite (de la vertu). Ce qui subsiste, ce sont, comme dans la nature, les jugements esthétiques. « Répugnant, ordinaire, rare, attrayant, harmonieux, abrupt, strident, contradictoire, torturant, ravissant », etc., et. Mais on peut donner à ces jugements une base scientifique. « Rare » est ce qui est réellement rare ; l’ « ordinaire » est souvent très précieux, plus que le rare, etc.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. La Volonté de puissance, II. Transl. G. Bianquis. Paris: Gallimard, 1938.